Apple suggests multiple antivirus tools for Mac OS

On its support website, the Mac maker posted an article called Mac OS: Antivirus utilities, which said: "Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus-writing process more difficult".

Apple's Mac OS X has always been regarded as relatively safe to security threats, with most hackers targeting Microsoft's Windows platform. However, it's unclear what prompted Apple to backtrack on previous advice.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, said: "Although there are fewer threats on the Mac platform at present, Mac users should still be thinking sensibly about security, such as following safe computing best practices like running an anti-virus product and keeping up-to-date with security patches".